Blessings and Stars (and parentheses, too)

After getting married and finishing graduate school and completing my clinical fellowship year, God moved us to Houston, TX. Now, I really couldn’t stand the city, but we lived in a suburb west of the city. It was really nice there. And I absolutely adore the people in God’s church there. I miss them terribly and thank God daily for the opportunity to live there and meet those people and have those experiences. They definitely taught me a lot. I can also never replace the experience as a speech pathologist gained in Houston. But, getting back to the present. My husband was let go from his accounting job 2 days before my youngest child was born. He did all sorts of odd jobs to help support us, though I had to work almost full time to pay the bills. (Do you know how competitive the accounting market is in Houston if you don’t have your CPA?!) For some reason (perhaps a certain 5 year old?), God gave him a ‘real’ job (9 months later) and moved us back to my hometown this past summer. So I went from a beautiful 2400 sq ft house on a nice corner lot (with an HOA telling us what and when to do every time we turned around) to a 1330 sq ft house on 3.3 acres with a huge fenced garden area, a pond, and an ancient root cellar (minus a roof…) in a teeny tiny town (where everyone still recognizes me even though I’ve been gone for 14 years). Did I mention I got to spend the entire summer with my kids? I am currently working 2 days per week as a speech pathologist, though I wish I could stay home more (hence the blog title). I am so excited to be here where my kids can grow up the way my husband and I did. Every time I take the dog out at night (no fenced yard…yet) I look up and actually see stars. Lots of them. And I am truly and overwhelmingly thankful for all that God has done for us. And thankful that through all our trials, with my husband as my rock, we have never wavered in our faith that God would see us through. (It just wasn’t how we pictured things…)